Front Range Biosciences CFO and co-founder Nick Hofmeister outlines the company’s propagation methods to create disease-free, pesticide-free, certified true-to-type clones for hemp, cannabis, and coffee. While it can take four to six months to clean new stock in the initiation process, Front Range now has 170,000 plants in its inventory and can multiply that stock at a rate of 3 to 4 times every 6 to 8 weeks, depending on plant variety. As a result, Front Range fills a critical niche in the cannabis industry, by offering disease-free plant propagation. Front Range’s plant propagation are also perfect for home growers in Canada and Hofmeister anticipates Front Range working with retail dispensaries and consumers directly in the future.
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Transcript:
James West: Our guest in this moment right now is Nick Hofmeister. He’s the CFO and co-founder of Front Range Biosciences. This is a private company, Nick?
Nick Hofmeister: It is a private company. We’ve been around for about two years, and have raised about $4.5 million into the company from venture capital.
Ed Milewski: Where are you based?
Nick Hofmeister: We’re in Lafayette, Colorado, just north of Denver and east of Boulder.
James West: So your particular focus as it pertains to cannabis is, you specialized in tissue culture, and so is that basically propagating cannabis through cytokines and that kind of thing?
Nick Hofmeister: It is a method of propagation that involves using sterile lab procedures to create disease-free, pesticide-free, and certified true-to-type clone. So these clones come out in the healthiest possible way, and then they’re delivered to cultivators to go into their grows. We do this for hemp, marijuana and now coffee.
James West: Okay. For the process from which you initiate a clone process, or, rather, a tissue culture process, till you’re able to deliver a clone product to the grower?
Nick Hofmeister: There are a few stages to the work that we do. The first stage is to bring the plants from the cultivator, or from our own library, into the tissue culture process; that’s called initiation. That cleanup process can take a while. It can take four to six months to get a plant into our process, into clean stock, and remove all disease, all pesticide, and certify that it is a true-to-type plant – it is the plant that you want it to be.
That process of four to six months is mainly driven by the fact that every single plant we’ve brought into our facility from our customers has at least one disease on it. Sometimes it’s two to five, all layered on top of each other. So that cleanup process can take